non-locality
|non-lo-cal-i-ty|
🇺🇸
/ˌnɑn.loʊˈkælɪti/
🇬🇧
/ˌnɒn.ləˈkælɪti/
not confined to a single place
Etymology
'non-locality' originates from English, formed by the negative prefix 'non-' (from Latin 'non', meaning 'not') and the noun 'locality' (from Late Latin 'localitas'/'localis' relating to Latin 'locus', meaning 'place').
'locality' changed from Old French 'localité' and Medieval Latin 'localitas', ultimately from Latin 'locus' ('place'); the compound 'non-locality' developed in modern scientific English by combining 'non-' + 'locality' to express the negation of locality.
Initially it meant simply 'the state of not being local' or 'not confined to a place'; over time, especially in 20th-century physics, it acquired a technical sense referring to correlations and interactions that cannot be explained by locality (e.g., quantum non-locality).
Meanings by Part of Speech
Noun 1
in quantum mechanics, correlations between spatially separated systems that cannot be explained by any local hidden-variable theory; typically evidenced by violations of Bell inequalities (often called quantum non-locality).
Non-locality is a fundamental feature of entangled quantum systems.
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Noun 2
the property of a theory, interaction, or operator in which effects depend on distant points or the global state of a system rather than only on local (infinitesimal) neighbourhoods; i.e., interactions not confined to a single location.
Non-locality in certain field theories can produce long-range interactions.
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Noun 3
in computer science and programming, dependence of behavior on information or state that is not local to a routine or scope (e.g., reliance on global state), making understanding and maintenance harder.
Excessive non-locality in a codebase can make debugging and reasoning about the program difficult.
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Last updated: 2025/12/28 04:40